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'Galactic Gal', UT alum with large social media following, uses platform to share significance of new NASA photos

NASA on Tuesday unveiled a new batch of images from its new powerful space telescope — the James Webb Space Telescope.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — This week, humanity got its first glimpse into some of the deepest reaches of the cosmos.

NASA unveiled some new images from a powerful, $10 billion telescope. The first image from the James Webb Space Telescope was released on Monday and showed a dizzying and striking collection of distant galaxies and nascent stars, dancing together across the universe.

"Imagine what we're going to learn from James Webb, and how it's just going to radically change where we come from, how the universe began," said Camille Calibeo, also known as Galactic Gal.

She is a University of Tennessee graduate with a significant following on social media. She has almost 93,000 followers on Instagram and more than 300,000 on TikTok, and she is using her platform to show people the significance of the new telescope.

She routinely posts videos sharing images from the telescope and shows her followers details they could miss in the images. In the first image, she pointed out spectra from galaxies that could be around 13 billion years old.

She was at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center when the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope were revealed, shoulder-to-shoulder with scientists and researchers who were equally as excited to see the deepest parts of the world.

She took her followers into the building with her, posting on several social media platforms about her experiences.

"This room right now is just absolutely electric," she said in one video posted to TikTok.

Her TikTok account is also filled with explanations about anything from gravitation lensing to moon dirt. Videos that discuss the possibility of humans traveling to Jupiter by 2103 and what objects sound like on Mars also fill her catalog.

She was an aerospace engineer who became a business strategist in an industry focused on space travel. She also routinely speaks to students across the world on topics including the importance of space exploration and space-faring technologies.

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